I dreamt that someone had chosen the old house I was brought up in as a location for a film (plot was unclear, something to do with singing cartoon nuns). I was the go-fer for the project. The main editing unit was in our shed but it was really damp and making all the sets rot. All the actors were complaining about their parts and the singing bits were awful (echos of 'Highschool musical' style stuff) and it was generally all collapsing around our ears - it was clear the project was crap. I tried re-writing bits, spending ours in our shed poring over manuscripts, but then the director finally turned to me and said...shall we just throw this away and do you want to write a new film? I was obviously elated at this, but just at that point, teenaged kids started crawling over the wall in the back garden and started throwing bricks and kicking things over. I was just readying me and a few nuns with bats to sort them out when the alarm went off.

Personally I blame the leeks I had last night for tea.

I dreamt God was writing to me. There are many peculiarities about this - not least that he was writing in a Jamaican accent, telling me to guard a bunch of stuff which I was keeping in a plastic bag strapped to my body to avoid a couple of gents in suits from nabbing off me. My companion, an old man, explained to me that because God was omnipresent, and probably speaking to a bunch of people at once, perhaps sometimes he got confused and forgot what accent he should use for who. Then I went off on a tangent and started wondering if sometimes he made...well, not mistakes but minor gaffs like a holy vision to someone which was actually meant for the guy standing next to him - it might explain why some visions are so cryptic. Something which is so obtuse it has one man scratching his head - if it had been shown to the guy next to him he make have immedatiately leapt up and gone "That's it!". I mean, omnipresent or not - everyone knows how difficult it is to multitask....

I dreamt that there was this poltergeist/vampire thing that was usually invisible but could then materialise unexpectedly (whereupon it looked like a classic vampire). I was in a large classroom/studio with a number of other people and it suddenly appeared and whizzed around the room picking people up and biting/ripping them apart. Then it chewed one guys arms off, at which point we all ran out screaming.

A day past...and we all trembled in fear of when they horrible mysterious animal would appear again. I decided to leave town, and we just fleeing when dusk was falling, whereupon the monster appeared again, screaming with teeth bared and grabbed me, carrying me off. I really didn't want my limbs munched off...and it just started to break one of my legs when I forced myself awake, and I was still so freaked that I actually had to sit with the lights on for a minute or two to convinced myself that I was back in reality.

Horrible!

I had to look after a work colleagues farm. Said work colleague doesn't really have a farm, but in my dream it was rolling acres of lovely green grass down a gentle slope, with a large red brick farmhouse covered in climbing roses. He was going on holiday, and he asked me to look after his animals for a bit. He had six sheep that needed letting out in the morning, and driving into a pen in the middle of the field at night. He also had some chickens which also needed letting out in the day, though when he was walking me around his farm explaining everything, I remember he told me I had to remember to put the cockatiels in at night, when I think he meant cockrels.

So he went off on his holiday and left me in charge. That first evening, I found I could easily round up the sheep just by leading them one by one. I laid my hand on its wooly back, and then guide it by pressing it against my leg and gently stopping it from straying side to side with my hand. The cockrels were equally as pliant.

The next day however, when it came to rounding up the sheep I found one sheep was dead, it looked like it had caught itself in a fence and wound the wire round its neck in its struggles to get free, and then had choked itself. Next to it was a tiny baby lamb, orphaned, and when I picked it up it felt slick and soft like warm liver, it was very strange. I carried the lamb over to the pen where the other 5 sheep had been led, and tucked it in next to the pen in the fold of a pile of my clothes that for some reason were all stacked up around the edge of the pen. Then I went into the farm house and wondered what to do. Inside, there was a huge loaf of unsliced bread and I got distracted and vaguely wondered about whether or not it would be stale by the time my work colleague got back. Then I considered hand rearing the lamb and started looking round all the shelves.

I was all for starting improvising hand rearing this lamb and went back out into the field, and there I sort my work colleague wandering around in barbar jacket and tartan hat - very upper class hunting gear - in a group with some others carrying guns and idly surveying the landscape. And then I woke up.

 

- Of course its pretty obvious where the core subject matter of that particular dream came from isn't it? I'm looking after a friends garden at the moment while she is away and I'm likely looking after some other plants during a coming weekend. The hand rearing is all Diggory's fault. The sheep, cockrels/cockatiels and the sheep death I *think* was my brain associated the bat handrearing scenario first with baby lambs, then with my Mum's mate back in the Isle of Man who has a mini farmstead with chickens and sheep (and lambs, which she hands over to make into meat periodically). Not quite sure why I chose the particular work colleague I did to own the farm metaphor but it was an unlikely choice, apart from the fact I know he lives in Wales and the hillside was very Welsh.

At least it wasn't raining.

It seems the world had been hit with an attack of liquid nitrogen, or at least...Port Erin in the Isle of Man. For some reason I was sneaking around in the middle of the night looking at it and I remember the ground feeling very cold underfoot - but basically the sea in the bay had been flash frozen into powder and was now blowing away, leaving very oddly shaped patterns of sand underneath (the bay had also become incredibly deep, so standing on the edge looking down was scary and intimidating). The sand that used to be under the water was in vast undulating heaps and troughs stretching out as far as the eye could see, and sparkling and glittering with the flash frozen sea that was blowing away in the wind like powdery snow.

It had all defrosted again by the next day, and when I went down to the bay there were huge crowds gathering watching the sea roar back into the huge troughs and humps, obliterating them. Inevitably, as always happens, the sea came in just a little bit too much and the entire village at water level was flooded by a foot though the sea was dead calm, and again I was alone and wading through it all trying to work out if the sea had stopped coming in now and where the edge of the bay was where it suddenly gets very deep.

Apparently I was keeping huge insects (e.g. the size of my hand) in a box and running things like eviction night of Big Brother. I don't remember much except I was trying to get a huge earwig to curl around in this see thru jar around a butterfly thing, whilst muttering "...and who goes..? You decided".

Also...a bunch of floating jellyfish had escaped from the jar. These were like regular jellyfish, only they could swim in air like they normally can in water. Big buggers with long dangly tenticles like those portuguese men-o-war and they were all floating around in the room brushing at my face and arms and stinging them. One or two of them were particularly nasty because they were almost practically seethru, you could only see them if you looked very very hard but they still had a nasty sting if you brushed up against them. It made them almost impossible to catch though.

...and the while, the insects muttered quietly to themselves wondering which one was going to go next.

I appeared to be handing around a large expensive do for some reason. It was in a large mansion or castle and all the staff were setting up. I was hanging around the entrance to the place where they were having the meal (which felt and looked like the doorway to a church) and I was fascinated by all the people rushing in and out.

The kitchen, oddly, appeared to be across the courtyard someplace a long way away and lots of staff were struggling dragging over flowers and plates and things. I espyed some plumpish lady struggling with a huge, really disproportionately vast, tray of bread so I ran over and offered to help. I took one handle and her the other though for a while we couldn't get our act together and spun round and round until we collapsed giggling and finally sorted ourselves out, sprinting to the door of the main hall.

This got me noticed by the Maitre D (a woman who looked suspiciously like the woman out of the old Kenko adverts) who kindly let me inside to watch the preparations, as long as I promised to stay out of the way. I was delighted.

The main hall was very strange, it was actually laid out like a theatre, with the door entering at main stage level and all the tables being laid out in tiered rows right up to the top. I helped straighten knives and forks and tidy flowers and generally try not to get in anyone's way, but I must have lingered too long because before I knew it, the guests started filtering in and I had to take cover and hide in the shadows.

Once all the guests were settled, I overheard one woman at the back and top torturing a waitress, saying she refused to have her order taken by an inexperience child, and that she was going to complain. The poor waitress was nearly in tears so I stepped out of the shadows in my combats and scruffy jumper and addressed the woman with a big charming smile.

I told her I was off duty (tugging at my clothes) but I was happy to take her order instead and take it directly to the head chef if she desired it. I said it in a way where I wasn't scared of her, and that I might have been senior staff if she but know it, so she better not mess with me in case she didn't get any dinner at all.

It worked. All of a sudden the woman became all giggling and apologetic and said she didn't mind really, but I insisted. I asked her to write her order on a scrap of paper and she did (she wanted lilleth salmon, and she wrote it on the top of what looked like a school essay written in copper plate hand). I winked at the other waitress, then took the order to the Maitre D and warned her we had a trouble maker. She explained that the woman was actually the teenaged daughter of the owner of the castle and the meal, hence why she thought she could take liberties. She thanked me for stepping in, and rewarded me by granting me my own uniform (a nice one, more like a waiters than a waitresses) and the liberty to wander around the hall intimidating people, which I did.

At the end of the meal, when everyone was served and settled down to eat, I hung around in the cloakroom with the waiters and they told me I had done so well I was going to get a full time job.

At that point there was a loud crash and the dream meandered off on some track about how you can hear screams in large houses, but because they are so large you can't easily track down where they came from or run there in time to find out if someone has murdered someone and....I kinda woke up.

I wonder if stress at work is getting to me and I secretly hanker to be a waitress...

All a bit confusing really. First I drove this landrover across a beach and up a slope and parked up for a sleep, not noticing that a guy came with a digger came as I dozed and carved all the ground away from the beach and turned it into a cliff so I couldn't get the car back down. I asked him for a ladder, and used this to get from the top of the cliff down to the beach, which had now turned all mangrove swampy and I remember the taste of salt as I was splashing around in the weeds and water.

Meanwhile...I dreamt that a sparrow was sleeping with a cat, which was clearly not going to work in the long term. The sparrow would come home and find the cat washing the dishes, he'd try to kiss her cheek and she'd pull away - they were too different and they soon split up. He was a mess then though, drinking too much and spending all his money on cheap sparrow prositutes covered in gaudy makeup and jewellery, and then one of them moved in and he suspected her of having an affair with a fish called Gordon. She kept Gordon in a tank in the garage, feeding him with huge bass that she had to drag on her own from the fridge to the garage. I only got a glimpse of Gordon but even though the cheap whore sparrow talked like he was a goldfish, he was actually a huge Great White Shark cooped up in a small swimming pool and yes, she was definately exploiting poor little man sparrow, he should have stuck living witht the cat.

...er...?

Okay for once I was neither in my old home in the Isle of Man or my Grandmother's home. Instead I was in some hotel room or chalet and I was noticing that it was getting hot, very hot, my forearms were starting to burn. I looked at the walls (which were painted municipal green) and smoke was kind of ozzing from it and it was starting to turn black, and I realised to my horror that the room next door must be on fire.

First I fled. Then I ran back quickly and grabbed a small ringbinder which looked disappointingly like the same ringbinder that's in the Art Gallery Mum helps run and contains various reciepts for stationary and things, and then I ran out. Behind me, the whole campsite was aflame and I hood up with some other refugees who also only had the clothes on their back now (and me with my ringbinder), a plump ish woman with ginger curly hair.

We stayed over somewhere, I don't think we had to pay but everyone locally knew that the hotel complex come circus had been raised to the ground with many deaths so they gave us digs gratis. Then I woke up the next morning and wandered down the street of the town - large magnolia herses were going down the street and everyone was waving them by. They were all going down to the burnt out site again for a memorial service. Confused, I followed on foot and hung around. The whole place was cordoned off with metal fencing though, and the only thing still standing was a twisty slide thing and a merry go round.

....if it isn't the herbal supplements that's doing this, maybe its the daylight saving change. Oh well, at least something happens in my dreams. The guy I share an office with claims he recently had a dream about a stick. It was in a deckchair in the middle of his garden - just a plain stick, nothing special. It didn't do anything either. And the other night he nearly dreamt about cheese...is that ironic?

I'd been on a business trip to the states. It was a real struggle to get to the airport in time and checked in, but then because I was so tired I had a snooze on the sofa and woke up to discover I'd missed the plane AND someone had stolen my passport and a sister I don't actually have. I was woken up by a security guard and it was then that I vaguely remembered a basket with a baby in, and noticed that my pockets were empty. I asked said security very politely and calmly what the procedure was in this cases...was there a lost children desk in the building or such like for instance...and he dragged me away and locked me up because no-one could possibly be as calm as me when they had just lost a baby....

....I think its this new herbal supplement I'm taking to help me sleep...

I dreamt that society had reverted to a state of superstitious wonder once again. God was now a huge firey towering figure all (black) bearded and hairy and growling, and at the end of time he was going to come stomping up and tread on everything and his head would detatch and shoot down and terrorise people, his hair flying behind him as it flew around.

Funny old business really.

Dreamt that someone was teaching kids to snort coke in my back bedroom using the foam off foam baths to practise with. I was one of those kids and I took a few goes at it, accidentally blowing instead of sniffing and not getting the idea until I had ruined all my practise soap bubbles. I did finally manage to get it right though, and when I did, everyone rushed for their camcorders and notepads to record it.

Nb I had watched 'City of God' right before this dream so I think the source of this bag of imagery is pretty self explanatory.

I was sleeping in a cellar or morgue or something, it had stone walls and vaulting and a concrete floor, and was divided into two by those plastic strips you sometimes see in supermarkets over the doors going back into the stockroom. Anyhow I had a bed in the corner and I woke up and could see things moving about beyond the plastic in the other room where there seemed to be many other beds like mine, and I called out and cheerfully warned the people moving about of the plastic strips being seethru. Suddenly someone parts the strips and reveals that all the dead bodies are up and about in a carved up state with bits hanging off and bits hanging out. This incl my dear husband with a sliced open neck, a bit disconcerting as he wanted to get into bed with me and I while I wasn't scared of him, I find it a bit freaky that he was all cold to the touch. No idea why I was there but it appeared that I wasn't dead and most likely holding a watch on the husband.

I blame Tim Burton for this one. Watched 'The Nightmare before Xmas' and 'The corpse bride' over Christmas plus a trailer with Yvette Fielding for 'Most Haunted' before going to bed provided the final trigger.

It started off with me wandering around this girls flat. Don't know why I thought it was a girls but I did and as I was looking through their book collection I saw all sorts of books sectioned off that were in different languages like chinese and arabic and such like.

Then suddenly I was squatting on the floor in this plain white corridor and this blue disembodied head was coming towards me moaning. I was with someone, also on the floor and we both started kicking back at the head trying to keep it away while it snapped at our feet. Their were beer mats lying around though, and while we battled off this head thing I quickly daisy-chained the mats together using little tucks and tears and assembled them as a ring around us. When the final link was in place and the circle complete, the head couldn't get in at us anymore and started howling so scarily that I actually woke up with a whimper.

I think this was a mixed up flash back of a Korean horror movie I recently watched melded with a keen need for a nice quiet evening down a pub. It's been a while since I woke myself up whimpering though. Last time involve live decaptitation and zombies I think.

The other day I dreamt that I was had to nail a steel plate template of Jesus into the bed od the stream that runs at the back of my Grandparent's place in Lincolnshire in order to repel the ducks. For some reason the flat metal pressing of Jesus was going to prevent all the ducks from swimming down our bit of the stream and it was vitally important that it was nailed into the stream bed ASAP. I didn't stay asleep long enough to learn why...

Quite a lengthy one this one. I think I had uncovered some sort of grand murder plot. An old man had mysteriously died and I somehow linked this to an owner of a shop via someone who would gain inheritance by the man dying and thereon to a whole bunch of people in cafes everywhere bumping people off - this was big man, and apparently I was next. I explained this some people, perhaps undercover cops, and we went over to said cafe to take a look.

Turns out the cafe is all seedy and cheap with worn flaking wallpaper and no actual food, it just sells ganja to stoned rastafarians and plays loud music. Me and my cop partner have to play along and somehow we end up in this commune for people who have hit rock bottom and hid here smoking weed all day to forget it. We join as new initiates and have to sit around pretending we're stoned - my partner isn't too good at it but I fool everyone and people keep coming up and wiping powder on my arm. The powder must be incredibly precious to them cos on one case this guy came up and literally turn his combat trousers pocket inside out and was scraping at the seams to get just a little bit of powder to rub on me. I guessed it was drugs but thankfully it didn't affect me.

I got talking to this guy who explained that he had really hit rock bottom when he came here and started raping people (then looked at me with a look I really didn't like so I backed off), then I wandered the grounds first making a circular pattern in the ground with my toe with another bunch of stoned people, then walking down to a lakeside shoreline where I recognised a woman I used to work with 10yrs ago and she was dressed as though she was just stopping by after work to feed the ducks rather than a member of the commune.

The woman I had been walking with looks very nervous that there is an outsider in their midst and I have to offer to hold her hand to walk her past this person. This meant I had to put down two wine bottles (one red and one white) and alcohol was strictly prohibited in this commune so I was gutted as I wanted to hang onto them.

Then I woke up, so I guess I'll never hunt down the killer...

A weird one this - basically a large field in front of the house had filled completely full of water, and it was now about neck deep and it was swirling round and round, a pale navy colour, very distinctive and unusual. As I stood and watched it with friends, suddenly heads started to appear in the water, they weren't screaming just going round and round, and then I saw four or five long horn cows, also a suspicious navy/brown colour swirling round and round.

I didn't stay and watch too long though. My dream segued into a horror movie where the hero is wandering around a spooky house and then gets turned into a mouse (albeit a walking talking only a bit like Stuart Little). Hero keeps wandering about, and out leaps a cat and I scream 'it's a 'cat surprise'' (which is a movie term for a false alarm in a horror movie designed to make you jump when you are waiting for the monster, so dubbed after the cat in 'Alien' that leaps out on at least two ocassions when the audience was expecting the alien to leap out, and does usually manage to startle you). I yelled out Cat Surprise and then realised the hero was a mouse and laughed my head off as the cat ate the mouse in one gulp and thought 'Very clever plot twist'.

Then I woke up. Reckon the source of these two segments is a. I went to see Anthony Gormleys thing on Crosby Beach at the w/e and there we all these calm figures standing waist deep in swirling brown/blue water (not sure about the cows though) b. Watched a couple of very naff horror movies and must have been studying the formula accidentally.

I dreamt that a new type of car engine had been invented that ran on water. We were only looking at a prototype scale model.

I filled it up with water, and it did indeed metabolise the water and power the car across the room. But it also completely made the engine disappear as well. So i had to build another one.

(I woke up instead)

Quite a quick one this, but basically my Mum was staying over, it was raining and I get the impression that because the weather was so crap, we had decided not to bother going to Cropredy this year (not that my Mum ever goes anyway). But either way, on the morning of the festival she looked out of the window and starts insisting that I pack and we set off. I'm now in a massive tiz because the festival takes a lot of prep and I hadn't done any owing to not thinking I was going (plus all Mum was taking was a handbag) and I had to ring my mate and warn him we were going anyway to see if he wanted to come.

Segue now to the field. It appears I now own a spectacularly large tent, the sort that is normally used for cafes or bars, and I've got it all kitted out with rugs and proper beds and sofas and throws and things. No sign of my friend by Mum is there, she steps in in her purple poncho after having a look around and I'm still in bed and thinking about a shower in my full sized shower unit at the other corner of the tent.

It turns out I like this tent so much that I'm going to stay forever, so when everyone else leaves I'm left on my own in my tent in the middle of a field and the farmer has to mow round me, but I don't care.

And then I woke up.

I dreamt my greenhouse collapsed! It was a particularly horrible experience because I was in it at the time. I noticed that one of the corners looked a bit off and fiddled with a bolt and found it was loose, then the whole thing slowly folded in on itself around me and all the glass shattered and powdered itself so when it was all over, I was stood in the middle not daring to move a muscle less I cut myself more than I already was.

I carefully stepped out of the rubble holding my arms and neck rigid and knowing that my hair was full of glass, and the crooks of my arms were full of glass, and even my lips felt covered in glass dust and ready to get torn apart if I closed my mouth. A couple of characters nearby rushed to help and started hosing me down with water very carefully to try and get rid of the powdered glass. They also picked out bigger bits of glass that were stuck in me - I was a bit of a mess.

I woke up about then. And has the experience put me off greenhouse ownership? Not at all! I remain defiant, no regrets!